Daily Rundown

On Monday, Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller blog spotlighted NBC's Chuck Todd and his wife's apparently cozy relationship with Hillary Clinton's campaign communication director, Jennifer Palmieri. The Todds sent out invitations for a September 2015 event at their house honoring Palmieri and her husband, Jim Lyons. The couple included the Clinton flack's supervisor, campaign chairman John Podesta, as disclosed in one of the e-mails released by Wikileaks.

During his MSNBC newscast on thursday morning, Jose Diaz-Balart abandoned his reporting to push his opinion on the death of “Cecil The Lion.” In the newscast, Diaz-Balart, along with Democratic Congresswoman Betty McCollum from Minnesota, called a larger focus on animal rights, and condemned big game hunting in general.

On Sunday, police charged 20-year old Jeffrey Williams with shooting two Ferguson police officers. The officers are alive and recovering. There is cause for rejoicing, unless you're attorney and radio show host Lizz Brown, who thought that was a sideshow to be quickly dismissed.

Appearing with Jose Diaz-Balart on MSNBC’s The Rundown on Monday, Brown glossed over it: “I think that the arrest is fine. But the challenge, Jose, is the conversation that we’re having about what's going on in Ferguson...we spent less than 24 hours discussing the resignation [of the Ferguson Police Chief], and the importance, and the significance, and ramification of that.”

Let's call this one "technically true, but misleading." On today's Daily Rundown, discussing the letter sent by Senate Republicans to the Iranian regime, Washington Post reporter Ishaan Tharoor said that "it is the president who ratifies treaties."

Tharoor is right, but only in a trivial sense. The president does formally ratify treaties in that he exchanges instruments of ratification with the foreign power(s). But that occurs only if and when the Senate has approved the treaty by a two-thirds majority vote. Tharoor made no mention of that little proviso.

On Wednesday night, liberal networks MSNBC and Telemundo teamed up to present a town hall on illegal immigration that featured President Barack Obama before a friendly auditorium of supporters and taking questions that ranged from softballs to ones from the far left that implored him to further expand his amnesty. The event was moderated by Jose Diaz-Balart, who serves as the anchor of both MSNBC’s The Rundown and Telemundo’s Noticiero Telemundo. From the start, it was clear that he was also on stage to play the role of advocate.

On Monday, November 17, Jose Diaz-Balart officially took over the hosting duties on MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown, replacing Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd, and now anchors two hours of MSNBC’s morning programming. The MSNBC host used his expanded role at the network to promote President Obama’s proposed executive action on immigration reform and warned that the GOP has “got to be very careful” in how they respond to the president.

On Thursday's Daily Rundown on MSNBC, Jim Miklaszewski misidentified the political ideology of the protesters that attacked three American sailors in Istanbul, Turkey. Miklaszewski reported that "these radicals – these right-wing radicals, who are pro-communist and anti-U.S. – were more intent on propaganda than causing these individual sailors harm." The perpetrators are members of the Turkish Youth Union, which hold left-wing views.

Chuck Todd, NBC News Political Director and moderator of Meet the Press, just released his latest book “The Stranger: Barack Obama In the White House” chronicling the Democrat’s first six years as president. While much of the book details the numerous political battles the administration was engaged in, three excerpts from the book are quite striking. Not only does Chuck Todd concede that MSNBC is openly leftist, the NBC host writes that “perhaps most frustrating to Team Obama was that even their allies weren’t always allies.”

The Republican devil would make him do it! On MSNBC's Daily Rundown today, Kristen Welker repeatedly blocked GOP Senator Ron Johnson's attempts to talk about President Obama's threat to issue an executive order granting amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.

When she finally deigned to discuss the issue, Welker suggested that Republicans pass immigration legislation so that Obama doesn't "have" to issue an executive order.

After citing numerous Republicans on the campaign trail criticizing the Obama administration's handling of the ebola crisis, on Thursday, MSNBC Daily Rundown host Craig Melvin condemned such criticism as "the politics of fear" and "irresponsible."

Appearing on Friday’s edition of MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown, the reporter with The Washington Post who broke the story that White House officials knew that advance team member Jonanthan Dach had a prostitute stay in his hotel room during the 2012 Colombian prostitution scandal joined the program and took to blasting the White House’s numerous claims that no such cover-up exists.

Reporter Carol Leonnig spoke with MSNBC’s Craig Melvin and slammed the Obama administration right from the moment she began speaking for their “red herring” of “the mistaken identity” and that it was “demonstrably false” for them “to say that the only evidence, which is what the White House is saying, that the only evidence involving this guy was that a woman had signed herself into this room.”

In an interview with Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus on MSNBC's The Daily Rundown on Thursday, host and incoming Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd proposed a cause for the GOP's difficulty in attracting women voters: "...do the arguments about contraception end up...putting the party on mute with those same women voters who may like your economic proposals but say, 'You know what? There's just too many crazy white guys who have crazy theories about my reproductive system and I'm not listening.'" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Priebus rejected the notion: "No, I don't think that's the case at all." Todd continued, this time imagining the thoughts of Hispanic voters: "And Hispanics, same thing. Hispanics who maybe on some social issues would be with you, but the immigration talk says, 'You know what? I can't trust because they've got a whole bunch of crazy guys that talk crazy on immigration.' Isn't that an issue?"

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